Today, I’m going to work on using worms to generate coral, similar to what I did way back when I was generating omnichromatic images.

In a nutshell:

• Spawn n worms
• On each tick:
  • Each worm tries to randomly move one direction
  • If it cannot, increment that worm’s stuck counter
  • If it can, restart the stuck counter
  • If a worm is stuck long enough, kill it off and spawn a new worm

Eventually, we’ll fill the entire space with colors that end up looking a bit like coral. I’ll probably extend this later, since there are a lot of cool tweaks you can do with this general idea.

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Okay, sketch 2: Boids!

The basic idea is to create a bunch of particles (the Boids in this case) and apply to them each a series of simple, limited rules that rely neither on communcation between the Boids nor a global controller and see what behaviors you can generate. Specifically, can you replicate the flocking behavior found in birds, since birds can obviously fly together without hitting one another and also without some lead bird giving orders.

Something like this:

For this case, there are three rules:

• seperation - Fly away from any Boids that are too close to you (to avoid collision)
• alignment - Align yourself to fly in the same direction as any Boids in your field of vision
• cohesion - Fly towards the center point of the Boids you can see

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One thing that I’ve been hoping to get into a bit more is the idea of Generative Art. Essentially, use any of a wide variety of algorithms to generate art. To do that, and so that the art can be generated right in front of you in the browser, I’m going to use the p5js library. It gives you a nice API of graphical primitives and takes a simple setup and draw function and does the rest.

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